Hundreds of thousands of slabs of steel may be transported from a steel mill, by rail or other means, in a given year. An individual shipment of steel slabs may have several distinct delivery destinations and each delivery destination may be allocated specific slabs within the shipment. Upon arriving at a destination the shipper may need to locate the slabs of steel within the shipment allocated to the destination. Locating the allocated slabs within the shipment may require manually identifying each slab in the shipment until all the allocated slabs are found. Manual identification of each steel slab may be a slow and time consuming process. A slow process may be particularly undesirable as there may be little time available for unloading, allocating, and reloading the steel slabs. Additionally manual identification of each slab may increase the costs associated with shipping the slabs.